Oxygen Pumps the Heart #4

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

According to Matthew Joseph Rodermund, M.D. (1854-1919) …

“All chemical experiments show that the affinity of oxygen for carbon is greater than it is for iron, so that when all these are forced together in the small, minute blood vessels the oxygen loves carbon better than iron and leaves the iron, and, uniting with carbon, creates animal heat.”

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E.H.J. (“How the Blood Circulates Without the Aid of the Heart,” Journal of Medicine and Science, Mar. 1899) wrote …

“‘According to Rodermund ‘another point demonstrates positively that the heart is not the real propelling power, in the fact known to the ancients, that after death the arteries are empty; hence, they were thought to contain air only, (and the name artery means air-pipe). If the heart were a pump it would be impossible for the arteries to be empty after death, for where a pump ceases to do its work, the fluid pumped would cease to flow, consequently, the blood would remain in the arterial system.’ Galen thought that the object of breathing was to take into the lungs ‘pneuma’ which was transformed by the lung tissue into vital spirits. He was not acquainted with modern chemistry, but ‘had this great ancient writer substituted the word oxygen for his spirits, his comprehension of physiology would have been ahead of ours at the present time, especially about the circulation of the blood.’ He thought, also, that ‘the mechanical force of the heart was not the only one by which the animal fluids were drawn or impelled in the needful direction, and a physiological force, similar to that of a magnet, attracted ingredients to the tissue for its nourishment,’ or as we would say today that the electrical power has something to do with the circulation. Rodermund has tried many experiments to discover how the blood circuit is made in the lungs, but ‘at present can only describe what is visible to the eye. When the lung is inflated with air, by cutting off a third of the lobe we find two vessels side by side and of an equal size — one an air-tube — out of the other a stream of dark venous blood flows and the balance of the lung or lung-cells present a bright red appearance.'”

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Branko Furst (The Heart and Circulation: An Integrative Model, 2014) wrote …

“Animal models show that significant distribution of drugs occurs up to 24 h postmortem. Although the uneven distribution is ascribed to diffusion, this would clearly have to occur against the concentration gradients. Thus, the unrecognized existence of vestigial circulation presents an ongoing dilemma in human toxicology, expressed by one of the authors as: ‘We conclude that this poorly studied phenomenon creates major difficulties in interpretation and undermines the reference values in the data bases where the site of origin of post-mortem blood samples is unknown’ (Pounder and Jones).

“The phenomenon of spontaneous return of circulation (SROC) after failed resuscitation is a medical curiosity that has likewise eluded a rational physiological explanation. It was first described in the literature in 1982 and is popularly known as the ‘Lazarus syndrome,’ or autoresuscitation. To qualify, the patients must have experienced a monitored asystole or pulseless electrical activity, from which they could not be resuscitated, followed by an unexpected, spontaneous return of circulation.”
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